Professional Sales News

HR Professionals must fully embrace the potential of technology in talent management to avoid losing credibility with their board, according to ReThink Talent Management.

In light of latest research carried out by the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD), the talent management consultancy has called upon HR professionals and resourcing teams to ensure they are using technology to its full potential in any people strategies in order to keep up with the candidate market and business arena.

The CIPD’s Social technology, social business? report indicated that almost two thirds (61%) of the UK workforce use a mobile device for work and one in nine have found a new job through this channel. While employers have started looking at the potential of social media, with over half (54%) using this medium for recruitment, there’s a clear gap in utilising this across wider people strategies with 78% of employees stating that their organisation doesn’t use social media to deliver learning and development.

These results suggest talent management strategies aren’t aligned to the end user – the employees. As Stephen Gilbert, Practice Director at ReThink Talent Management, explains “Talent strategies – whether implemented by internal teams or external suppliers – must be driven by the business world and candidate expectations. If, as the CIPD report suggests, social media and mobile technology are significant influencers in our working lives, it’s vital that these resources are used as part of the full people agenda.”

“However, it’s clear that many talent management practices have yet to embrace technology within wider people processes, with the CIPD reporting very few organisations incorporating this into development and training solutions. If HR teams and resourcing professionals fail to address this, there is the risk that people strategies will become significantly outdated. It would also be interesting to measure engagement levels and business impacts as a result of social interaction. In our experience we find that few companies achieve true engagement with its social initiatives and therefore it’s hard to quantify the return on investment from implementing social practices.”